What is Impression Fraud?
27th October 2006
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Impression Fraud is a sneaky & unethical way of harming your competitor. In order to explain Impression Fraud, let me ask a question. What would happen if your keywords got a ton of Impressions, but no clicks? Answer: You’d end up with a very low CTR. And, Google penalizes keywords with low quality scores by lowering position, and increasing minimum bids. Then, turn your campaign back on. Voila! You will most likely have a higher position and lower Avg CPC. Impression Fraud is much harder to prove than Click Fraud. Microsoft is thinking of using Pay Per Percentage model as a solution. No related posts. |
October 27th, 2006 at
Shimon … good point. The only thing I’ll add is that this might not be as easy to do as it sounds.
Whenever an advertisers turns off his ads and then brings them up … Google lowers them in the rankings to wait for some CTR data. The reason why they do this is “maybe” because of the Impression fraud, and/or maybe because they want to get the NEW CTR before bringing the advertiser back up again.
Yes, if you get your ads back and bid 2 times more than the next highest ad, I am sure Google will have you at #1, but otherwise, I do think they implement a “PPC Ad sandbox” (a few hour one).
Have you ever noticed this before?
October 27th, 2006 at
Hey Igor…nah, i haven’t encountered Impression fraud yet. It probably isn’t used as much as click fraud. I don’t have any research data to back up my assumption.
I’ve never heard that Google “lowers them in the rankings to wait for some CTR data”. My Google rep told me that the Quality Score remains unchanged whenever you pause a campaign.
If what you’re proposing was the case, then think of all the advertisers that would be penalized for manually dayparting. Where did you get your information?
October 29th, 2006 at
[...] What is Impression Fraud? Does it ever end? This has been a problem since day one with Google’s yield mechanism, but luckily, when you’re bidding on 25 million keywords like we are, I DARE anyone to try and impression fraud us! (tags: Impression Fraud) [...]